For 2 ½ years now, AMC Theatres has been showing the same ad before every movie. It stars Nicole Kidman and it features her waxing upon the beauty of the moviegoing experience (preferably at an AMC Theatres chain, of course). It was meant to coax audiences, who rightly stayed away from movie theaters at the pandemic’s height, back to seeing movies in public. It was so popular (to the shock of Kidman’s husband) that they kept showing it, like an aperitif. Back in 2022 the chain promised they were making a sequel, though how could one improve upon perfection?
Looks like we’ll find out sooner or later if that’s possible. Per Deadline, CEO Adam Aron revealed during a quarterly earnings call two things: 1) They made not one but three new Nicole Kidman ads; 2) They’re going to start slipping into rotation on March 1, i.e., the day Dune: Part Two officially opens.
Aron described it as “phase two of the Nicole Kidman campaign,” and seemed to imply that audiences (or at least projectionists) had grown weary of showing the 60-second commercial, “the same one, that’s appeared over and over, before every movie starts.”
And so, starting Friday, audiences will see one of three new ones that will “kind of randomly appear in our theaters prior to the show.” (He stressed that audiences will get different ones, not three in a row. That would be weird.)
This begs some questions: Will the new ones — any of them — top the original, the one where Oscar-winning thespian, who once spent a year-plus shooting the same Stanley Kubrick film with her future ex-husband, says, “We come to this place for magic”? The one where she says, quite movingly, that “heartbreak feels good in a place like this”? Will audiences recite the lines of the new ones out loud, as they do now, treating it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Will they even welcome something new? Or will they revolt in anger that their beloved original Nicole Kidman AMC ad is gone?
Or maybe they’ll all be very good and we’ll be okay with moving on. Perhaps the original will be seen as a relic of a time when we were most of us terrifying of going to the movies, fearing some stranger(s) will infect us. Or maybe they’ll stink on hot ice and they’ll go away, and we’ll go back to sitting through a half hour of trailers followed by that longtime cheesy welcome-to-AMC intro that used to feature a guy being so startled by a movie that he gets his popcorn everywhere, then right into the main feature.
Or maybe — and this is a good idea — they should go back to what the movies did from the ‘30s into the early ‘60s and show cartoons before the movie. AMC could pay cartoon villain David Zaslav for those hundreds of classic Looney Tunes he erased from (HBO) Max and play them before Kristen Stewart’s forthcoming lesbian thriller. Cartoons are a great cleanser before watching a movie. Then again, seeing a movie at AMC Theatres without a trace of Nicole Kidman would be kind of sad.
(Via Deadline)